Monthly Archives: May 2009

Pro Tools is a strong multi-track editing program, but unless you’re willing to drop some change on a custom keyboard, it can be tough to learn all the keyboard shortcuts. I’m featuring one a week in an attempt to highlight the tricks I find most useful.

Extend Selection to Previous Region Boundary: Option+Shift+Tab

This is the converse of last week’s shortcut, Extend Selection to Next Region Boundary. While I don’t use this shortcut all that much, the principle is the key takeaway. Adding Option to most commands in Pro Tools will either do the opposite action (instead of adding a marker, it might remove a marker) or reverse the direction of the action, like in this case.

Pro Tools is a strong multi-track editing program, but unless you’re willing to drop some change on a custom keyboard, it can be tough to learn all the keyboard shortcuts. I’m featuring one a week in an attempt to highlight the tricks I find most useful.

Extend Selection to Next Region Boundary: Shift+Tab

This is perfect for grabbing a selection when you’ve either already trimmed the region boundaries, or if the boundaries are just close enough. I always play out the tracks I’ve recorded for the artist to listen to before I start a mix. This lets them catch any last minute issues before I devote a lot of time to a project. Since I always through down markers to tag the starts of takes, this shortcut is an easy way to grab a whole take, quickly.

Last weekend I was over at Mortal Music Recording Studios in Charlestown, MA. Andy Pinkham runs the space, and he’s put together a great room with some great toys.

We were recording Boston band Pray for Mojo, a four-piece instrumental group. The drum kit was miced up in the live room, DI off the bass and keyboards, and the guitar amp was isolated in another room for flexibility later. Everything came out really well, and I’m looking forward to getting back over there sometime soon.

This past weekend Belikos asked me to come out to Utica, NY, to help with a recording session at Castle. The band was solid, and cranked out most of two complete tracks in one day. I’m planning to do most of the post work from home.

Castle was a very cool place to track. Matthew Wagner, chief engineer, is a great guy and found some fantastic sounds. The room is an old church, and designs for the conversion were done by our old friends at the Walter-Storyk Design Group (the same folks that redesigned the Duderstadt Center Audio Studio at the University of Michigan). I sensed that it was a John Storyk room when I walked in, based on the design and acoustics - very good all around.

My only complaints were the decay time in the live room (useless for drum tracking - and why else have a live room???) and the Yamaha DM2000 console. From what Matt said, they’re still working on the decay in the live room, so they get a pass - I’ll be curious to see what they’ve done next time I’m back. The console though, I don’t know about. If all of the work you do is in the box, what does a digital console get you that a control service doesn’t? Especially one as convoluted as a Yamaha board? I had the experience of learning on a Yamaha O2R96, which is basically the same interface. Unteachable. And I sure don’t remember how it works. Good thing Matt was around.